Philly Got Something Right
No.221: July 26, 2024
Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before hitting the paywall, but today’s is short and free of charge. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Pennsylvania. It’s been a trying month of travel and I am run pretty-well ragged. That lingering bug that hit our household this month is still hanging around. Steady improvement, but it is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of thing. At least the persistent cough has dissipated, and I managed to maintain enough energy to complete my work here this week.
That work was to teach and lead a seminar for Doctor of Ministry students at Westminster Theological Seminary on Foundations For Christian Public Witness. We had a wonderful and edifying time. They had arrived having already watched hours and hours of video lecture and having read a long list of required reading. So over three days I lectured for a few more hours to wrap things up and then the students did presentations on the readings and we had seminar-style discussions. Just an engaged, diverse, and insightful group of local pastors wanting to get deeper than the typical shallow culture war and/or political binaries and to understand the times so as to equip the saints for their works of service. It is always heartening to learn that there are many, many faithful people doing great work in relative obscurity and that the platform climbers with the loudest online and cable-news megaphones are not the only thing happening. As I often say, Don’t Panic. Or another one: “Aslan is on the move.”
As my mental state could be described as fuzzy and exhausted, I’ll just share a few things that I noticed or that occurred to me. Interestingly, it turns out that some of the work I’ve been doing this year seems to have particular salience. During our group discussions, the intellectual lineage or relation between Herman Bavinck and Cornelius Van Til came up. And, well, you can click here to preorder a book that has my contribution on that exact topic. Our discussions also related to the cultural challenges from the left and the right. Look for the forthcoming Sept/Oct issue of Modern Reformation for my essay on that topic. And one discussion brought up what you might think is a pretty ancillary theological question: do human cultural artifacts of this world survive the Day of Judgment and enter into the New Heavens and New Earth? It turns out that that is a very significant question, as it serves as a window into all sorts of underlying theological presuppositions. Lo and behold, look for the forthcoming issue of Reformed Faith & Practice for my essay on that question! It just struck me as pretty cool that for a number of the “itches” the students needed scratching I’ve already got published material in the pipeline.
Also of interest this week is that we delved a bit into the question of whether the civil magistrate—particularly, a Christian civil magistrate—has the jurisdiction and authority to enforce the totality of God’s law. That is, including the first table of the law, to enforce true and proper worship of God and to punish unbelief or heresy. I leaned heavily on a passage from my now somewhat dated and obscure book Politics & Evangelical Theology. Later that night, I received an email from a random pastor somewhere asking me a question about that book because he is using it in a small group study! Such a weird coincidence; that book never comes up, but when it rains it pours.
How much does it pour? Just today TGC published this article from Kevin DeYoung: “‘Of the Civil Magistrate’: How Presbyterians Shifted on Church-State Relations.” He decisively demonstrates that when American Presbyterians revised the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1788, they broke decisively with their British counterparts on the very question of the magistrate’s mandate to enforce true religion. It’s a fascinating historical point; more interesting is the question: who was right? London, or Philadelphia? What do you know? Philly got something right. Check it out.
I apologize for the shorter Square Inch. I’ll be back in Montana and into a normal routine next week! Have a great weekend.
Looking forward to the essays! By the way, the Reformed Faith and Practice link in the article links to Modern Reformation instead at the moment.
While it may have been wise to put a damper on the Magistrate's duties as we did, compared with how Europe had been operating, I've never been satisfied that the mental models we've constructed in order to justify this scale-back are good or correct.
Take the first table / second table distinction, for example. We Protestants have correctly spilled a lot of ink explaining how everything's connected. If a man murders a man, in actuality he's breaking two commandments, one from each table. Luther had a lot to say about this.
So, its never correct to maintain that the first table are "inner heart" issues that the magistrate can ignore, just focusing on the "outer action" issues of the second table. Everything's connected. One day you're tolerating aberrant worship with priestesses; a few days later, a witch sets up shop on the town square, selling pharmakiea.
Of course, this highlights what we Americans were really up to, doesn't it? We didn't just nicely decide to tolerate first table offenses. We decided in fact that we shall in deed suffer witches to live. After all, witchery isn't strictly mentioned in the decalogue is it?
I feat that we didn't just outdo the Europeans in toleration. It seems to me like we actually ended up copying the Europeans in a kind of weird platonic reductionism when it came to God's law.
To put it another way... I'm not hating the idea of Stephen Wolfe's ideas gaining traction because he has the temerity to say the magistrate should become more energetic in "religious" matters (there's that platonic distinction again. As Van Tilians, don't we believe everything's religious?).
I'm hating it because I really don't think Wolfe knows, or wants to uphold, God's law at all. I think he wants to give the appearance of it, while clinging to a lot of wax nose natural law ideas which tickle the ears of Christians like him who don't really believe in the continuing validity of God's law, or at least are highly selective about it.